Effie Brown's Identification Talk Looks at What Being a Leader Means

We often hear about identity in terms of things like race, religion, sexuality, and other deeply held personal attributes, but Effie Brown's identification talk looks at it in terms of leadership. Working as a film producer, Brown is a de facto leader, but she raises the question of whether she identifies as such, and further, what it means to her to be a leader in the first place.

Brown grew up watching a lot of TV and movies, and the heroes and heroines in those narratives often tended to be action characters. From Alien to Terminator, the leaders had an intense amount of pressure: "if you mess up, you die," as Brown puts it. Beyond that, those protagonists were often the outsiders and weirdos.

In her talk, Brown ultimately posits that those traits — the pressure and the outsider mentality — are real reflections of being a leader.